Dong-ho’s Mother Character Analysis

“Let’s go home,” she says. You give your wrist a violent wrench, trying to shake free of her grip. The insistent, desperate strength in that grip is frightening, somehow, making you think of someone drowning. You have to use your other hand to pry her fingers away, one by one. “The army is coming. Let’s go home, now.”

[…] You turn around and call back to her: “We’re going to close up here at six, Mum.” […] You call again, louder this time: “Once we've closed up, I'll come home. I promise.”

[…] “Make sure you do,” she says. “Be back before the sun sets. We’ll all have dinner together.”

She could have pressed her hands over her ears, could have screwed her eyes tight shut, shook her head from side to side or moaned in distress. Instead, she simply remembered you, Dong-ho. How you darted away at the stairs when she tried to take you home. Your face frozen with terror, as though escaping this importunate plea was your only hope of survival. Let’s go together, Dong-ho. We ought to leave together, right away. You stood there clinging to the second-floor railing, trembling. When she caught your gaze, Eun-sook saw your eyelids quiver. Because you were afraid. Because you wanted to live.

Middle-school boys all had their hair cut short back then, didn’t they, but it seems to have gone out of fashion now. That’s how I knew it had to be you—I’d know that round little chestnut of a head anywhere. It was you, no mistake. Your brother’s handme-down school uniform was like a sack on you, wasn’t it? It took you till the third year to finally grow into it. In the mornings when you slipped out through the main gate with your book bag, and your clothes so neat and clean, ah, I could have gazed on that sight all day. This kid didn’t have any book bag with him; the hands swinging by his sides were empty. Well, he must have put it down somewhere. There was no mistaking those toothpick arms, poking out of your short shirt sleeves […] It was definitely you.

“I don’t like summer but I like summer nights”: that was something you came out with the year you turned eight. I liked the sound of those words, and I remember thinking to myself, he’ll be a poet. Times when you three boys sat out on the bench in the yard, sharing watermelon with your father on hot summer nights. When your tongue groped for the sticky sweet remnants smeared around your mouth.

There was something meek and gentle about those single-lidded half-moon eyes. The traces of infancy still lingered in the soft line of his jaw. It was a face so utterly ordinary you could easily have mistaken it for that of another, a face whose characteristics would be forgotten the moment you turned away from it.

Permission? Yes, you have my permission, but only if you do it properly. Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again […]

Whenever we had a toe war, I always won.

He was really ticklish, you see.

All I had to do was poke his foot with my big toe and he’d start squirming.

At first I couldn’t tell whether he was grimacing like that because he was ticklish, or because it really hurt…

But then he would turn bright red and laugh.

“Let’s go home,” she says. You give your wrist a violent wrench, trying to shake free of her grip. The insistent, desperate strength in that grip is frightening, somehow, making you think of someone drowning. You have to use your other hand to pry her fingers away, one by one. “The army is coming. Let’s go home, now.”

[…] You turn around and call back to her: “We’re going to close up here at six, Mum.” […] You call again, louder this time: “Once we've closed up, I'll come home. I promise.”

[…] “Make sure you do,” she says. “Be back before the sun sets. We’ll all have dinner together.”

She could have pressed her hands over her ears, could have screwed her eyes tight shut, shook her head from side to side or moaned in distress. Instead, she simply remembered you, Dong-ho. How you darted away at the stairs when she tried to take you home. Your face frozen with terror, as though escaping this importunate plea was your only hope of survival. Let’s go together, Dong-ho. We ought to leave together, right away. You stood there clinging to the second-floor railing, trembling. When she caught your gaze, Eun-sook saw your eyelids quiver. Because you were afraid. Because you wanted to live.

Middle-school boys all had their hair cut short back then, didn’t they, but it seems to have gone out of fashion now. That’s how I knew it had to be you—I’d know that round little chestnut of a head anywhere. It was you, no mistake. Your brother’s handme-down school uniform was like a sack on you, wasn’t it? It took you till the third year to finally grow into it. In the mornings when you slipped out through the main gate with your book bag, and your clothes so neat and clean, ah, I could have gazed on that sight all day. This kid didn’t have any book bag with him; the hands swinging by his sides were empty. Well, he must have put it down somewhere. There was no mistaking those toothpick arms, poking out of your short shirt sleeves […] It was definitely you.

“I don’t like summer but I like summer nights”: that was something you came out with the year you turned eight. I liked the sound of those words, and I remember thinking to myself, he’ll be a poet. Times when you three boys sat out on the bench in the yard, sharing watermelon with your father on hot summer nights. When your tongue groped for the sticky sweet remnants smeared around your mouth.

There was something meek and gentle about those single-lidded half-moon eyes. The traces of infancy still lingered in the soft line of his jaw. It was a face so utterly ordinary you could easily have mistaken it for that of another, a face whose characteristics would be forgotten the moment you turned away from it.

Permission? Yes, you have my permission, but only if you do it properly. Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again […]

Whenever we had a toe war, I always won.

He was really ticklish, you see.

All I had to do was poke his foot with my big toe and he’d start squirming.

At first I couldn’t tell whether he was grimacing like that because he was ticklish, or because it really hurt…

But then he would turn bright red and laugh.